It goes without saying that professional sport often comes hand in hand with a hefty paycheck, but not every athlete embraces the lavish lifestyle traditionally associated with their job.

Take iconic snowboarder Mike Basich for example. Sure, in his prime you could describe Mike as the typical sportsman. He was earning $170,000 a year for competing and filming around the world, and whenever he did come home, it was to a 4,000 square-foot house that didn’t scream modesty.

These days though, things are a little different for Mike. The American now lives in a tiny house isolated deep in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Talk about getting away from the rat race…

Now, Mike’s set up may not sound too glamorous right away. There’s no toilet or electricity after all. But it is set on a 40-acre private snowboarding heaven, it has its own private hot tub, and its fitted with a chairlift system which includes fitted trays to carry your lunch. Not bad, eh?

When you hear all that, it’s not so hard to see why Basich walked away from the million dollar mansion. It’s pretty much what any snowboarder would try and build on The Sims after all, but while it is a simple dream, it took a hell of a lot of effort to turn it into a reality.

The dinky dream house took five years and 175 tonnes of rocks to build, and Basich had to hand-mix all of his cement himself. You can’t picture Cristiano Ronaldo doing that now, can you?

On top of that, the chairlift system took eight months to build, although it’s pretty damn impressive that he was able to build such an awesome system with just a few mates to start with.

15 years after giving up competition then, Basich now spends his time riding and shooting in the Californian backcountry, rising and sleeping with the turn of the sun, and taking in some of the most breathtaking views ever seen from a balcony.

“I like to think of it as getting back to the basics of humanity,” he told Seeker Stories in the video below. “I like feeling connected to the earth more than I could with the 4,000 square-foot house. It was a childhood dream that I wanted to fulfil.”

Fulfil it he certainly did, leaving the world behind for his own personal snowglobe. Find out more in the video below:

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